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I interviewed Sam Hammond, Director of Social Policy at the Niskanen Center, on native-born men, the feminization of economics, gender essentialism, and more!
Transcript below:
Cathy: Hi, Sam, how are you doing?
Sam: Awesome. I'm super well, thank you.
Cathy: I'm just gonna introduce you real quick. For anyone who doesn't know, Sam Hammond is the director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, prolific tweeter, my good friend, and ex-boyfriend. Thank you so much for your time today, Sam. Anything I missed?
Sam: No, I think you covered it.
Cathy: Awesome. Yeah. So I wanted to speak with you today about any topics you wanna discuss. But the thing that I've been focusing on most recently is the plight of US native-born men. Particularly things that we see like polarization, atomization, kind of a move toward reactionary politics, low and declining labor force participation rates, the rise of men who are not in education, employment, or training, things like that, and some possible policy solutions to some of these problems. And then any kind of cultural analysis that you think is important to bring up as well. I know that your work focuses a lot on welfare and social assistance programs. There's a big theme in a lot of the writing around NEET men that social assistance is actually part of the problem and contributing to the situation. Do you think there's any merit to that?
Sam: Not in the case of single childless men. In fact, the US social safety net is weakest for childless single men, almost nonexistent. Like TANF, which is the main welfare program doesn't even recognize single childless men for eligibility. There are other sorts of programs. However, I mean, one of the intersecting trends you have to juxtapose with declining labor force participation and stuff like that is the rise of people living with their parents and the kind of delayed or arrested development, the delayed jumpstart into a career.
And it's hard to pin down exactly what's causing this. I think there are bigger macro trends. You know, the boomers holding on to their housing wealth makes it harder to start a family, rising education and credentialing standards delays. When you get to start your career, the relative decline in working when you're in high school and doing kind of crappy entry level jobs and working your way up. I don't think there's any one causal explanation.
Obviously the change in work towards the knowledge economy is one of the bigger ones when it comes to sex and balance and stuff like that. Women are graduating with bachelor's degrees at much higher rates than men at this point. And what that causes is all the women in your hometown move to go to college and suddenly your hometown has a sex imbalance and the college that they're going to has a sex imbalance in the opposite direction.
And so there's also this sort of musical chair problem where there's mismatch in the marketplace for mates.
Cathy: Yeah. That's a really interesting point. And I hadn't really thought about that. I'm wondering whether these women tend to move back to their hometowns or. I guess, cuz I definitely see in cities like New York and DC, you have more college educated women than college educated men in those cities. I'm wondering about other major economic hubs. You know, Chicago, let's say, whether the gender imbalance is similar. It certainly seems like to an extent college educated men kind of have their pick of women because most matings are assortative. Most women who have a degree want a man with a degree. Most heterosexual couples want the man to have slightly more or similar levels of education and income.
Sam: To be six foot four, sorry.
Cathy: Oh yeah. Well, you know, there's preferences. So it makes sense that, I mean, in alienated America, Tim Carney talks about brain drain and not just brain, but like the people who would make up the leaders of civil society, leaving their hometowns and the people being left not really having those leaders.
And so the civil society kind of crumbles. But I haven't really thought about the gendered aspect of that, where there would be more men marriageable or marriage-age, men than women in those places.
Sam: That's an interesting, yeah, no, Helen and has made that argument too, in the context of female labor force participation. That before there was a big increase in women moving into labor markets, it wasn't as if they were just sitting around doing nothing all day. They were organizing community. So it's only natural to expect some of these civil society or institutions to crumble. Obviously secular decline in unionization and stuff like that matters as well. The decline in membership-based parties where being a Democrat or being a Republican meant showing up to the convention and stuff like that. But I think the bigger drivers are probably the labor market and these mismatch dynamics. And there's not really an easy solution, because knowledge work and managerial work, which is the other big source of employment growth, things like nursing, these are more gendered professions, for better or worse. And the kinds of traits that employers select for say in a management role are the more conscientious types. Men obviously can be conscientious. But we can also be very non-conscientious, especially if you're among the cohort that's struggling the most.
Cathy: Yeah. And that's another interesting aspect of it is that the men with lower levels of income and education tend to be more, oh, what's the word for it? Wedded to gender gendered expectations, wedded to a gender binary, wedded to a more traditional idea of masculinity and femininity, which makes it both more difficult for them to take on the wife role in a marriage and makes it more difficult then for them to take on roles that are coded female right now.
I'm with you. I really think that the central problem of marriage right now, we need to recognize the fact that not being married impacts men much more severely negatively than not being married impacts women. Men are less healthy, less happy, and more lonely when they're single versus women.
Which I think then snowballs into these issues of atomization and radicalization and grievance politics. As long as the demand for feminine-coded labor or labor that’s genderless, but men and women are equally suited to by default, as women get more education and the labor market demands more education…
I had Shoshana on, from R Street, and we talked about some of the barriers to getting men in the labor force, the growing licensure requirements and hoops you have to go through. Obviously that's a problem. But at the end of the day if it's becoming not useful to be masculine in our economy and in our marriages I just don't see a way around a rethinking of masculinity to give these men something to do.
Sam: Right. But I guess that the crux there is then how much to attribute to innate factors versus culturally encoded factors. And, you know, I tend to think nature vs nurture is a false dichotomy. But the ways in which nature manifests in culture, that's the part that's variable across the world and based on the world development and stuff like that.
But there are genuine differences between men and women. Sexual dimorphism is one of most tested propositions there are in psychology. And that it's not to say that there aren’t exceptions, that there aren't non-binary people that there aren't other kinds of edge cases. But for the 90% plus of Americans who are cisgendered and so on, there are very deep-seated gender differences. And those will cash out in the form of different occupational preferences, different expectations that are mostly implicit and right. It's not that you can make a sweeping generalization and say that all men want to be the breadwinner or something like that.
I don't think that's the case at all. But I do think that there is some degree of self-worth and esteem that men get when they feel like they have status. And the status is in terms of resources like income and a good job. Or could be because they're at the top of the pecking order in the city gang or something like that. There's all kinds of ways that you can get status, to be the best, whatever, ball player. Maybe one solution to this is not to fight against the male nature of wanting to acquire resources and status, but to create new ways of acquiring resources and resources and status that are less zero-sum.
Cathy: Yeah. I mean, I definitely wanna dig into that further. What are the useful ways to help men acquire resources and status that are positive-sum and in keeping with… Obviously I'm not gonna deny that some gender differences are innate or biological. It does feel to me that the gender essentialism is overestimated a lot of times. I mean, we definitely see throughout time and space that what is considered masculine does change based on context and resources and incentives. Right now we see, for example, and I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but at least in American society, that men tend to be less conscientious, less agreeable than women on average. But we also see that little boys are socialized to be less conscientious and agreeable than little girls. Little girls are heavily punished for not being conscientious and for not being agreeable in a way that's not true of boys. And so I'm wondering, you know, how difficult is it going to be in your opinion to shift our conceptions of masculinity, I guess. What barrier does nature, just to use shorthand, or innate gender differences, how much of a barrier is that gonna be, do you think, to a reconceptualization of masculinity that would enable men to find status and meaning and purpose in things that are currently coded feminine, like being the leader of the PTA or being the primary caregiver or doing feminine-coded labor.
Sam: I mean, obviously status is always relative. So I think the way you create useful status hierarchies for men to compete on or to basically fragment the forms of competition. And in some ways that's already happening. I mentioned Valant or videogames. That's one area.
And maybe that's one reason why men are spending more time playing video games is cuz they're trying to climb to the top of that particular pyramid. But being the head of the PTA is a form of status. Being just one nurse among many or something like that is not as appealing to most men.
I’m really reluctant to think of human nature as a barrier to anything. We shape our hammer to fit our hand rather than some idealized appendage. Our social technologies are tools just the same. We should try to mold them to our natures rather than the reverse.
So there's certain empirical questions you have to settle in terms of what is malleable and what's not. In the case of gender differences, it is a hard thing to disentangle because you have socialization, but you also have genetics and they are co-determinants and they happen at the same time.
How do you disentangle causality? And that's where things like twin studies and cross-national studies and things come in handy. Because it really does turn out that certainly there's ways that socialization adds the content of what is coded as masculine in a particular day and age.
Some things are obviously more arbitrary than others. Just like evolution doesn't care too much about hair color. But to think that they're totally malleable can lead to bad places and can really cloud your policy response. A good example would be, for generations, most people are right-handed,
And for generations, there are people who are left-handed, who are forced to write with the right hand. That was cruel and unusual. And it's good that we don't do that anymore. But you also shouldn't redesign society so that there are 50% left-handed scissors and 50% right-handed scissors.
Cathy: Yeah, no, I think a system that works against biology is gonna be not ideal. It's just a question of what actually is biological and what is cultural?
It just feels like we are socializing boys for a world that doesn't exist anymore. we're socializing boys to be rowdy and rambunctious and competitive and loud and physical and not conscientious and to see… you know, go ahead.
Sam: Big Five personality traits are probably some of the most… all personality researcher is a little bit suspect. But like the Big Five are the traits that are most likely to be stable over your lifetime. They are very heritable. So, I mean, a girl who grows up with a bunch of older brothers will be a little more rough and tumble.
There are always socialization changes from the margin. And again can fill in certain content where you become Islamic if you grew up in Egypt, but you become Christian if you grew up in the south in the us. But at the end of the day, there's a deeper religious communal group impulse, that those cultural markers are just filling up a kind of content form.
I think it works the same with a lot of gender relation questions. We shouldn't assume that we just need to make men more adaptable to the current reality. The current reality could change. Obviously technology is going to continue and there could be all kinds of surprises in the future in terms of how these opportunity costs and stuff balance out and what kind of behaviors get incentivized. But then there's also just been like what Tyler Cowan and others have called the feminization of society and culture. That’s a trend that could reverse. It's a trend that could face some kind of backlash.
And it's a trend that you could potentially use policy to balance.
Cathy: Indian Bronson mentioned the feminization, Tyler Cowan stuff before. I'd love to dig into that a little further. I think to an extent there's definitely a feminization of education. That's been really not helpful to anyone.
I think education is definitely an area where we're producing boys and girls, but girls are just better able to overcome it. We're training people for a reality that doesn't exist anymore. And that's a huge missed opportunity. But it seems to me that making it about feminization or masculinization kind of misses the point that like K-12 is failing everyone. You're just graduating people without any skills in an economy that needs skills more than anything else. But I'm curious about what I'm missing about the feminization of society and why it matters. I’d love it if you could just kinda like briefly summarize, maybe it'd be useful to just give an example.
Sam: You mentioned education. Academia is an epicenter for feminisation. It is definitely part of this broader trend in terms of managerialism and more administrative roles and things like that that are often, for better or worse, populated with women.
HR departments, stuff like that. You know, that's like the stereotype. Or in the case of higher ed, student services and stuff like that. So if you look at econ seminars, economics was historically notorious for having very disagreeable cultures around their seminars.
You'd be giving a presentation and people would be raising their hand to object to something that's on the first slide. It's like, oh, Jesus, give me a chance to get through it. But that was part of the ethic of scrutiny that was applied. There's definitely been a trend, at least anecdotally, where that's become more out of fashion. And you also have folks who, whether econ or physics or other programs that are like, we need to make this more accommodating for women in STEM or something like that. We need to be more gentle. And in some ways it's almost like patronizing to women that they can't, you know, take some criticism. But more often I see that the demand for that coming from women themselves. Sometimes vicariously on behalf of someone else.
That has plusses and minuses. There's ways in which feminization has been obviously a net good. Like the broader decline in violence. There's all kinds of ways where it's a positive. The question is on the margin. And in particular contexts, if we're able to have open and honest discussions about the cost and benefits of both masculinity and femininity.
Cathy: Yeah. To some extent, it kind of sounds like it's less a concerted effort to feminize and more just a combination of women being valuable than we've ever been in the market economy and women coming into fields at greater numbers than ever before. And women taking our preferences in norms and getting them to be more normal.
That makes sense. And so, if we expect the demand for femininity, let's just say, to increase and the demand for masculinity is currently understood to stay stable or decrease, what's to be done with these men? How do we get them plugged into something useful?
Sam: The first thing to say is I'm not confident enough to say that we can just extrapolate linearly from what's happened over the last 40 years or so. I would say as a diagnosis of the last 40 years, it's true that the rewards of femininity have increased and the rewards to masculinity have decreased. Sometimes quite literally.
Stagnant wages among men with high school degrees is at least the reduction of a rent that men used to receive when women weren’t in the labor market. So there has been a redistribution implicit there. But looking forward, like in the same way that since the seventies manufacturing employment peaked and declined, we can't be sure that over the next 40 years the kinds of roles, that the kinds of dynamics that have promoted recent feminization might not reverse.
So like a good example, we just talked about managerial jobs and administrative jobs and bureaucracies and stuff like that. Or even healthcare. Those are all areas where AI is really well-suited to automating a lot of work. So it becomes much less clear about how to predict going forward.
The policy solutions, at least in the near term, are kind of obvious. We should be disinvesting on the margin from college for all models of education. Models of broadening vocational apprenticeship type pathways. Even doing tracking in high school would be useful. A lot of male dysfunction sort of peaks and declines after you're 25 years old.
More concentrated attention on how to deal with that population. Geographically, a lot of these mismatches might solve themselves if the education and labor market dynamics change. But even if they don't, these are transitory dynamics because this town that lost all its marriageable women to college is not reproducing itself.
So in generations from now we're all gonna be in cities anyway.
Cathy: But I mean, it's difficult for me to imagine a scenario absent, like more war, where the traits we code as masculine currently are going to grow in value. At least some of them. It's hard for me to imagine an economy in the future where physical strength is a major plus, again, because of automation.
I'm just curious about what are some of your potential scenarios where demand for masculine labor increases relative to demand for feminine labor?
Sam: Well, if the demand for feminine labor decreases and nothing else changes, then it, then that's a relative increase. But it's really hard to predict. There have been these two concurrent trends. One where men are getting more into weightlifting and stuff like that.
And then one where men are getting more into like skin care. And sometimes it’s the same men. There may be just purely cosmetic approaches to masculinity. The point about war is interesting. It's definitely true that there are no gender egalitarians and foxholes. We go to war and we wanna win the war.
When things are existential, you sweep away a lot of the ideology and just try to recognize that a man in combat can carry back their fallen comrade because they have more muscle density and stuff like that.
Cathy: But it's also true that a woman can operate a drone as well as a man.
And that's the direction war is going in. So even in that scenario, it's just like, just not clear to me that the masculinity as currently conceived is ever gonna be the advantage.
Sam: I agree with that, especially like in the metaverse or whatever we're going towards. So it may not be a clear answer.
It may just be that people have to voluntarily opt into communities that valorize more more forms of manual and masculine virtue. But it's clear that one of the forces, at least chemically and hormonally, that leads to declining testosterone levels and stuff like that is just how sedentary we are. It's hard to find like fat people in the 1940s. Someone who was like mildly obese was the circus Fatman because we have people who were active and just moving around and didn't havetons of calories. One of the ways that artificial intelligence may play a role here is in helping people to the extent that we all will all have super intelligent personal assistance.
The kinds of behaviors that lead to sedentary, short termist kind of lifestyles that aren't fulfilling that don't create meaning, you can break yourself out of that. But it's often easier if you have a community. In lieu of a community, the reason the community is useful is cuz you have peers who are providing motivation and pressure and setting examples.
I don't think we'll ever be totally atomized at that level. But even for folks who are having an AI that can tell you to get off the couch or pump you up or whatever. There could be all kinds of ways where automation actually leads to a kind of return to more organic modes of life because we choose to do them, not because we're forced to do them.
Cathy: Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting point. I hadn't really thought about that. I'm very pro-technology, pro-innovation. It just seems to me that especially young childless men in America are suffering from a crisis of meaning and purpose.
I could see an AI as like a first step toward getting to a place of meaning and purpose potentially. But it just seems like the barriers to meaning and purpose and community and connection are just…
Sam: For all intents and purposes, the deck is definitely stacked towards the brave new world scenario where we use intelligence, just like to have sexbots and cha bots that like the movie Her, where we fall in love with our personal assistant. That's not a very pretty outcome.
Cathy: Yeah. It's very depressing. Right. But, you know, that's why I think there's been also this sort of shift in the rationalist world towards rediscovering tradition and stuff like that.
I don't think it's been a sacrifice of rationality so much as rediscovering the implicit rationality in certain older school norms. Monogamy is one of those. Like we talk about when Robin Hansen got excoriated for talking about sexual distribution. I think it's because people had in mind that he was advococatingh having paramilitaries rounding up women and redistributing them across the hinterland or something like that. Which, I can understand the confusion cuz it's a very poignant way of describing the concept. But monogamy was a kind of sex distribution. Arranged marriages in India are a kind of sex distribution. And their primary purpose was to maintain a kind of equilibrium.
Cathy: And I think that's really important. Monogamy is for the benefit of low-status men. In a society where monogamy isn't to norm, then you will often have a few high-status men getting all the pussy. And a lot has enough as it is. And so monogamy helps smooth that out for sure.
And I think that that's a useful technology. But we're just in a place where it just doesn't work mathematically. There's one woman for every man. But if every woman is expecting a man who's slightly better educated in higher income than she is and there aren't higher income, higher educated men to go around, it's a math problem at the end of the day. And so either the men have to get degreed and paid or the women have to lower their standards or something else has to happen.
Sam: It’s not so much lower their standards. But this applies to men and women. It's not about lowering of standards. It's about localizing your standards.
A lot of the Jonathan Haight stuff on Instagram and social media usage driving anorexia and eating disorders and stuff like that. That's not because women have risen their standards too much in terms of like sex appeal and body image and stuff like that so much as they’ve globalized their standards where they're comparing themselves to the 99th percentile in the world, rather than in their local community. The same thing happens with men where. I think mass media and communications technology is partly to blame here.
Like you felt like a hundred thousand dollars at your job was really, really good until your buddy who moved away from home and went to Berkeley or something is making half a million at McKinsey or something. Your universe of comparison cases has gotten so big that everyone is dissatisfied, cuz there's always someone better.
Cathy: That's an interesting point and I think it matters. I'm not sure it matters to this discussion because it's like super universal that women aren't looking for a guy with a PhD. They are of course looking for a hundred thousand dollars job. But what ends up happening is men and women both choose partners who are, where the man is just slightly above. I agree that my phrasing was poor. I don't think that it's a lowering of standards necessarily to say, I don't need my husband to have a degree, or I don't need him to make more money than me, but it is a changing of standards.
But if every woman does expect this, it is a math problem. And so the standards are gonna have to, again, the men are gonna have to step up in these areas where they're gonna have to step up possibly in other areas and women are gonna have to adjust their expectation accordingly. And if we're gonna get everybody married off… but I'm on the cheap zoom and I'm almost at time.
So I wanted to give you a chance for any last thoughts and to let people know where they can learn more about you and read more of
Sam: Ham cheese on Twitter. That's about it. It's good to see you, Cathy.
Cathy: You too, Sam. Cool. Thanks for coming on. And I will talk to you soon.
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